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Preface
- University of Nebraska Press
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Preface The main title of this book may raise a few eyebrows. To what “betrayal” is the author referring? Surely neither antisemitism nor hostility to Israel can be seen as prerogatives of leftism; and if they do exist in some quarters of the Left, is that not an example of “legitimate criticism” of Israel—a country regularly pilloried in international forums as one of the last remaining bastions of Western colonialism? I have been hearing such arguments for over forty years, ever since (as a young radical) I myself participated in the student revolts of 1968, in both America and France. True, for most of my contemporaries (born like me after the end of World War II) the “Jewish Question” still seemed marginal at that time. However, in my case, it was something more than mere background noise. Perhaps, because I had been born in the Muslim Republic of Kazakhstan, in Stalin’s Soviet Union at the height of the Great Dictator’s prestige, following the victory over Hitler’s hordes; perhaps because my father’s experience as a wartime prisoner of the NKVD (secret police) meant that from the outset there was great ambivalence in my own mind concerning the “fatherland of socialism.” My father, who in pre-1939 Kraków had been a fellow-traveler of the illegal Polish Communist Party, nourished some bitter memories of Soviet mendacity after the war and the cruelty of a totalitarian system that ruthlessly crushed all individuality. My mother was slightly more inclined to socialist ideas. Her negative experiences of bourgeois Catholic antisemitism in interwar Poland had been much worse than anything she encountered in Stalin’s USSR, though she, too, had no illusions about the “Communist paradise.” I grew up in 1950s England, seemingly far removed from these totalitarian nightmares. Nevertheless, during my adolescence I was becoming radicalized at grammar school, at the very time that Great Britain was beginning to definitively shed its colonial Empire. In 1961 I first visited Israel, spending a month on a far left kibbutz—fascinated but also slightly repelled by its intense collectivist ethos. It was also the time of the Eichmann trial which made me even more intensely aware (at the age of 15) of the Holocaust—in which so many of my own relatives had been killed. I would return to Israel in 1969 after two years of study and radical protest (mainly in Stanford, Preface x California) against the “capitalist alienation,” racism, and militarism of the West. I had already read the Marxist classics while still a pupil at Kilburn Grammar School in London and then at Cambridge University where I found most of my fellow-students to be far more conservative than I was. My own “ideology” at that time was somewhat eclectic—a mixture of the Frankfurt Freudo-Marxist School of Sociology (especially Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse), Sartrian existentialism, the French “situationist” school, and a dose of Guevarist Third World mythology thrown in for good measure. My first adult encounter with the Jewish State in 1969 was by no means easy or painless. The intellectual baggage I came with did not predispose me to any special sympathy with a country that struck me then as being dangerously intoxicated with its stunning military victory of June 1967. The result had been to greatly expand Israel’s borders from the frighteningly narrow dimensions of the ceasefire lines after the 1948 war, to something that seemingly offered secure and defensible boundaries. The other side of that coin was a certain degree of hubris which seemed to me frankly alarming. As the literary editor of the peace-oriented left-wing magazine New Outlook (in Tel Aviv) I found myself at the age of twenty-four suddenly and unexpectedly thrust into the internal political debates of the Israeli Left. I did not get on with the principal editor of the journal, Simha Flapan, who came from the left wing of the Mapam movement—a Marxist-Zionist party whose power base was in the kibbutzim. He was a strange kind of debunking “postZionist ” before the term even existed. Though no Communist fellow-traveler, his view of the Cold War and the Soviet Union struck me as naïve. Even at the height of my own anti-American feelings in the late 1960s as a result of the Vietnam War, I had never seen the United States as being morally equivalent to the U.S.S.R. Having been trapped in Prague for two weeks as...